A few weeks ago, I was sitting in my car alongside the north end of Teterboro Airport in New Jersey listening in on the tower frequency. Several of the pilots on the ILS to Runway 19 were asking for wind checks, and the tower’s answer was consistent — 240 degrees at seven knots. No big deal, right? But a look at the airliners passing overhead at around 3,000 feet on final for Runway 22 at Newark gave a clue as to why there was so much concern about the surface wind. The big boys were crabbed at what looked to me like a 15- to 20-degree angle to the right of their actual track. Maybe more. Then I clicked on my Garmin 396 to check winds aloft on XM Weather. Sure enough, even as low as 3,000 feet, the early winter wind was howling out of the northwest at better than 50 knots. With almost calm conditions on the ground, that sounded like a recipe for significant wind shear. But strangely, this time, no one at Teterboro was reporting any such excitement on final.
It is not unusual at Teterboro to hear the tower controller asking every third arrival or so whether they experienced wind shear on final. The reported gain or loss of airspeed is then announced to each arriving flight, as in: “15- to 20-knot loss of airspeed reported by all types at 1,200 feet.” When I asked a Falcon jet pilot based at Teterboro what he expects this time of year when wind conditions vary to that extreme, he said, “You’ve really got to be concerned about wind shear.”
